Built-in Administration Tools

Command Line Utilities

All Message Queue utilities are accessible
via a command line interface. Utility commands share common formats,
syntax conventions, and options. These utilities allow you to perform various
administrative tasks, as noted below, and therefore can require different
administrative permissions:

The Broker utility (imqbrokerd) starts up brokers and specifies their configuration properties,
including connecting them together into a cluster. Permissions: User account
that initially started the broker.

Administration Console

The Message Queue Administration Console combines
some of the capabilities of the Command and Object Manager utilities. You
can use it to perform the following tasks:

Connect to and control a broker remotely

Create and manage physical destinations

Create and manage administered objects in a JNDI object
store

However, you cannot use the Administration Console to perform such tasks
as starting up a broker, creating broker clusters, managing a JDBC database
or a user repository, installing a broker as a Windows service, or generating SSL certificates. For these, you need the other command line utilities
(Broker, Database Manager, User Manager, Service Administrator, and Key Tool),
which cannot operate remotely and must be run on the same host as the broker
they manage (see Figure 1–1).

Figure 1–1 Local and Remote Administration Utilities

See Chapter 2, Quick-Start Tutorial for
a brief, hands-on introduction to the Administration Console. More detailed
information on its use is available through its own help facility.

JMX-Based Administration

To serve customers who need a standard programmatic means to monitor
and access the broker, Message Queue also supports the Java Management Extensions
(JMX) architecture, which allows a Java application to manage broker resources
programmatically.

Resources include everything that you
can manipulate using the Command utility (imqcmd) and the Message Queue Admin
Console: the broker, connection services, connections, destinations, durable
subscribers, transactions, and so on.

Management includes the ability to dynamically
configure and monitor resources, and the ability to obtain notifications about
state changes and error conditions.

JMX is the Java standard for building management applications. Message
Queue is based on the JMX 1.2 specification, which is part of JDK 1.5.

For information on the broker's JMX infrastructure and how to configure
the broker to support JMX client applications,, see Appendix D, JMX Support.